I had been playing a lot of keyboards on my recordings lately. A piano is a great instrument to ferret out a pretty melody in a new song. But I was ready for a change back to loud.

Last year, my cousin, Matt Henderson, from East Lansing, Michigan had asked me to help out on a recording he was doing. He sent me a demo of “You Don’t Have To Be”. I was immediately struck by the beauty of the song, especially with Matt’s excellent vocal and piano tracks. Unfortunately I had just broken my ankle and no matter how much I wanted to help, I just couldn’t get it together.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to record my arrangement of “You Don’t Have To Be”. From the beginning I heard the song with a full electric sound chugging along in the background with screaming leads over the top. Matt’s arrangement was very beautiful, but I needed over-driven guitars, thumping bass, and crashing cymbals. I recorded it nearly the way I heard it in my head all along.

“You Don’t Have To Be”

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The song was written by Matt Henderson. I am responsible for the arrangement. I performed all the musical and vocal parts. I used a Shure SM-58 microphone to record all the vocals. I played my Fender Stratocaster electric guitar on the recording using my Line 6 Pod 2.0 as a direct box. I played bass guitar on my Rickenbacker 4001. The drums are a combination of MIDI patches and a Roland Octapad drum pad using Session Drummer 3.

I recorded, mixed, and mastered this song on my desktop computer using a PreSonus Firebox audio interface, with Cakewalk Sonar v8.5 Producer and Sony Sound Forge v9 software. The master is recorded at 24 bit at 44.1 kHz resolution.